H

H is also the chemical symbol for the element Hydrogen.

H is also a multi a-side single by Japanese singer Ayumi Hamasaki.

H is also the title of a Korean thriller made in 2002. Please see H (2002 film) for more details.

h is also a compliation album by Japanese singer hitomi. See h (hitomi) for more information.

The letter H is the eighth letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English is aitch [eɪtʃ], or in some dialects haitch [heɪtʃ].

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, this symbol is used to represent two sounds. Its lowercase form, [h], represents the voiceless glottal fricative, and its small capital form, [ʜ], represents the voiceless epiglottal fricative.

History

Egyptian hieroglyph "fence"	Proto-Semitic ħ	Phoenician ħ	Etruscan H	Greek (H)eta
				File:GreekH-01.png

The Semitic letter ח (khêt) probably represented the voiceless pharyngeal fricative (IPA /ħ/). The form of the letter probably stood for a "fence". The early Greek H stood for /h/, but later on, this letter, eta (Η, η), became a long vowel, /ɛ:/. (In Modern Greek, this phoneme fell together with /i/, similar to the English development where EA /ɛ:/ and EE /e:/ came to be both pronounced /i:/.)

In Etruscan and Latin, the sound value /h/ was maintained, but all Romance languages lost the sound — Romanian later re-borrowed the /h/ phoneme from its neighbouring Slavic languages, Spanish developed a secondary /h/ from F, then lost it again, and Castilian /x/ has developed an [h] allophone in some Spanish-speaking countries. In German, h is typically used as a vowel lengthener, as well as the phoneme /h/. This may be because /h/ was sometimes lost between vowels in German, but it may also have to do with the fact that Romance lost /h/. Hence, H is used in many spelling systems in digraphs and trigraphs, such as ch in Spanish and English /tʃ/, French /ʃ/ from /tʃ/, Italian /k/, German /χ/.

Usage in English

Name of the letter

The English name of the letter is generally pronounced /eɪtʃ/ and spelled aitch[1] (or occasionally eitch). Pronunciation /heɪtʃ/ (and hence spelling haitch) is usually considered to be h-adding and hence nonstandard, however it is standard in Hiberno-English, and among Saint-Léonard Italians in Montreal. It is common in Australian English, often identified with those educated by Irish emigrants in Catholic schools. In Northern Ireland it is a shibboleth as Protestant schools teach aitch and Catholics haitch. The pronunciation affects the choice of indefinite article before initialisms beginning with H: for example "an HTML page" or "a HTML page".

It is often assumed that the pronunciation /eɪtʃ/ is a result of h-dropping, but in fact the original name of the letter was /aha/; this became /aka/ in Latin, passed into English via Old French /atʃ/, and by Middle English was pronounced /aːtʃ/. The pronunciation /heɪtʃ/ is a hypercorrection formed by analogy with the names of the other letters of the alphabet, most of which include the sound they represent.

Value

H occurs as a single-letter grapheme (with value /h/ or silent) and in the 2-letter graphemes ch(/tʃ/), gh (either silent or /g/, /f/) , ph (Greek words with /f/), rh (Greek words with /r/), sh (/ʃ/), th (either /θ/ or /ð/), wh (either /w/ or /ʍ/: see wine-whine merger). In transliterations from Russian, zh may occur for /ʒ/.

H is silent in some words of Romance origin:

• Initially in heir, honest, honour, hour; for American English usually also herb, and sometimes homage.
• For some speakers, also in an initial unstressed syllable, as "an historic occasion"; to retain the "an" and pronounce the H may be considered affected.
• After ex when x has value /gz/, as exhaust.
• For many speakers, after a stressed vowel and before an unstressed, as annihilate, vehicle (but not vehicular).
• At the end of a word, as cheetah, verandah.

Usage in French

In the French language, the name of the letter is pronounced /aʃ/.

The French language classifies words that begin with this letter in two ways that must be learned to use French properly, even though it is a silent letter either way. The h muet, or "mute h", is considered as though the letter were not there at all, so masculine nouns get the article le replaced by the sequence l'. Similarly, words such as un, whose pronunciation would elide onto the following word would do so for a word with h muet.

For example Le plus Hébergement (accommodation) becomes L'Hébergement.

The other way is called h aspiré, or "aspirated h" (though it is still not aspirated) and is treated as a phantom consonant. Hence masculine nouns get the le, separated from the noun with a bit of a glottal stop. There is no elision with such a word; the preceding word is kept separate by similar means.

Most words that begin with an h muet come from Latin (honneur) or from Greek through Latin (hécatombe), whereas most words beginning with an h aspiré come from Germanic (harpe) or non-Indo-European (harem, hamac) languages. As is generally the case with French, there are numerous exceptions. In some cases, an h muet was added to disambiguate the [v] and semivowel [ɥ] pronunciations: huit (from uit, ultimately from Latin octo), huître (from uistre, ultimately from Greek through Latin ostrea).

Some of these distinctions have been preserved in English through Anglo-French: an honour vs. a harp.

Dictionaries mark those words that have this second kind of h with a preceding mark, either an asterisk, a dagger, or a little circle lower than a degree-symbol.

Usage in German

In the German language, the name of the letter is pronounced /haː/.

In the German language, this letter is used in the digraph "ch" and the trigraph "sch" to indicate completely different sounds. Following a vowel, it often silently indicates that the vowel is long: In the word "erhöhen", only the first <h> is pronounced as /h/. This is the origin of the spelling (or pronunciation) of the English ejaculation "Eh?" which is not at all like an English pronunciation of the letter "e".

In 1901, there was a spelling reform which eliminated the silent <h> in all instances of <th> in native German words such as Thee or Neanderthal. Due to opposition by monarchists, the word Thron "throne" was exempted from this and left with <th>.

Codes for computing

class="template-letter-box | In Unicode the capital H is codepoint U+0048 and the lowercase h is U+0068.

The ASCII code for capital H is 72 and for lowercase h is 104; or in binary 01001000 and 01101000, correspondingly.

The EBCDIC code for capital H is 200 and for lowercase h is 136.

The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "&#72;" and "&#104;" for upper and lower case respectively.

Meanings for H

• In astronomy,
  • H would stand for Mercury (Hermes) in the provisional designation of a natural satellite or ring discovered around it.
  • H is a provisional designation prefix for any comet, asteroid, or minor planet discovered between April 16 and 30 of a year.
• In biochemistry, H is the symbol for histidine.
• In chemistry, H is the symbol for hydrogen.
• In computing:
  • ^H is often used jokingly to indicate the intended deletion of the previous letter (see also W). This is because some operating systems use the control character ^H to delete the previous letter on a line.
  • The file extension .h is used for C header files.
  • H is an ITU-T series of recommendations on Audiovisual and multimedia systems and used in their names such as H.323. See ITU-T recommendations.
• In cosmology,
  • H is the Hubble constant
  • h is the dimensionless Hubble parameter, h = H/H₀, where H₀ = 100 km·s⁻¹·Mpc⁻¹
• In electromagnetism:
  • H or H or H is the symbol for magnetic field strength.
• In English slang, H is a term for heroin, a recreational drug that is highly addictive.
• In international licence plate codes, H stands for Hungary.
• In Japanese, H was originally an abbreviation for "hentai" (pervert). It has come to mean sexual, as in H games (pornographic computer games) or H suru (meaning "to have sex"). Through the popularity of anime (Japanese animation), the old incorrect meaning has become known to fans in the west. See also Ecchi.
• In mathematics, blackboard bold $\mathbb {H}$ represents the quaternions (after William Rowan Hamilton, $\mathbb {Q}$ representing the rationals).
• In music, H is a note in the German system, corresponding to B natural; for example, in the BACH motif
• In physics:
  • h is Planck's constant.
  • H is the symbol for magnetic field intensity.
• As the first letter of a postal code:
  • In Canada, H stands for the Metropolitan Montreal area.
• In radio,
  • the NATO H band ranges from 6 to 8 GHz.
• In science fiction fandom and hacker jargon, the infix of an h is a method of "marking" common words, i.e., calling attention to the fact that they are being used in a non-standard, ironic, or humorous way. It is likely to have originated in the fannish catch phrase “Bheer is the One True Ghod!” from the mid-20th Century. The h infix marking of "Ghod" and other words spread into the 1960s counterculture via underground comics, and into early hackerdom either from the counterculture or from SF fandom (the three communities overlapped heavily at the time). More recently, the h infix has become an expected feature of benchmark names (Dhrystone, Rhealstone, etc.); this is probably patterning on the original Whetstone (the name of a laboratory) but influenced by the fannish/counterculture h infix.
• In the SI system:
  • h, hecto, is the SI prefix meaning hundred, 10².
  • H is the symbol for the SI derived unit for electric inductance: the henry.
• In thermodynamics, H is enthalpy.
• H is the stage name of Ian Watkins, formerly of the pop group Steps.
• H is the nickname of Adrian Smith, guitarist for the heavy metal band Iron Maiden.
• [H] (within brackets) is the ASCII representation of the logo of the HardOCP web site.

See also

• ĥ
• ħ
• Eta

Template:AZsubnav H is the nickname for a very big ogre from Sudbury